…but probably not for the reason you think.
I admit it. I’ve fallen prey to the pretty covers and sprayed edges that are so prevalent these days more than once. Almost always this winds up not working out in my favor, so I’ve largely taken sprayed edges and special editions (at least on books and authors that I’m completely unfamiliar with) as a red flag for “judge this book by its cover at your own risk.”
When I discovered Allurial (a romantasy-specific sub-subscription of Book of the Month), it was like waving a big crack rock in front of that guy from the Dave Chappelle show (way before his problematic nature became obvious).
In any case, it’s super tempting, and I decided to try my luck with a copy of “The Entanglement of Rival Wizards” by Sara Raasch as my first pick. If you haven’t read it yet, it’s a MM fantasy romance with an enemies-to-lovers theme.
I don’t read a lot of MM, mostly because I’m admittedly a reader that prefers to self-insert and it just doesn’t do anything for me. I can’t remember if I’ve talked about it before but I sometimes go as far as preferring brunette protagonists, but that’s due in large part to a lot of baggage I had growing up in a time when blondeness and the Christie Brinkley California Girl aesthetic was valued above all. I remember quite clearly thinking that if I could only bleach my naturally black hair blonde my elementary school crush would love me.
Dumb, I know, but it’s stuck with me and I’m still trying to show that little girl that she’s fine just the way she is. It’s a huge part of why anything I’ve written myself features protagonists that look like me. I write for that little girl, and I read for her too.
That shouldn’t be as bad as it sounds, because everyone deserves to see aspects of themselves reflected in books and other media, which is why it’s so important to provide authors from minority groups a genuine shot at being discovered (as opposed to pressuring already-successful authors to shoehorn diversity into their books so you end up with what is hopefully unintentionally racist depictions or yet another book where the FMC has a sassy POC best friend.)
So, when I try to read outside of my usual, I prefer to go Own Voices every time. Hence the rival wizards book (I’ve had TJ Klune on my TBR for some time as well). I’m not a stranger to stories where there are MM romantic relationships, having grown up devouring Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, but I don’t usually read anything that’s primarily a romantic story with explicit smut featuring MM or WLW relationships. I’ve read plenty where it’s featured as a subplot regarding side characters.
So Rival Wizards was me branching out, but it was once again a reminder of why I tend to avoid MM and WLW. It was written by a woman, and further, it seems like it was written by a woman who has a considerable back catalog of MM romance.
I’ll say right here that the reason I didn’t finish the book had nothing to do with the fact that it was MM. The main protagonist was insufferable and immature and kind of just a crappy person so when it came to trying to understand what the love interest saw in him, I couldn’t come to any other conclusion other than it was that he was hot. Wanting to fuck someone because they’re hot is fine. I did it before I got married and I’m not ashamed of that. However, romance fiction almost always comes with the requirement of an HEA, which precludes liking someone for more than their looks (in my opinion, anyway).
From the limited internet research I’ve done, it seems like she’s writing it primarily as a means of balancing the scales of representation because her earlier works were so lacking. An admirable thing, I guess, but why is a woman responsible for doing this? Why aren’t we out there trying to find actual gay romance written by legitimately gay people? Why aren’t these people being promoted as part of Own Voices?
I have no idea if Sarah Raasch is queer or not, but that’s not really the point I’m trying to make. These stories are being purchased, they are popular, and the people that are profiting from them are not the people that are living them, and that doesn’t really feel right to me.
I just can’t get past the ick factor inherent in people repeatedly writing explicitly sexual stories that don’t reflect their own preferences. And apparently it’s happening a lot.
Another quick google search shows that romance readers are overwhelmingly female-identifying (~80%), while authorship is even more overwhelmingly female and white (~90%). Looking at books listed on Romance.io, ones listed under the MM category number 73,412, whereas lesbian romance is at a mere 23,808.
The most recent data I could find on the sexual orientation of authors was from a 2017 survey by the Romance Writers of America, but it suggests that upwards of 80% of authors identify as heterosexual (no mention of gender identity, unfortunately).
Given all of this, it’s not unrealistic to assume that most MM romance is written by cisgender heterosexual women, considering how they dominate what little concrete stats I could find on authorship identity.
All of this is to say, how does one distinguish between “legitimate” MM romance and romance that is written from a primarily voyeuristic, fetishistic perspective? Can we consider MM romance written by actual gay men more valid than something written by a cishet woman? Am I being a petty bitch? I’ve learned that a lot of Own Voices MM romance is referred to as gay romance (Christopher Rice immediately comes to mind) whereas the stuff I’m referring to is simply MM romance, which is why I refer to it as such.
This is just a roundabout way of me saying that I have repeatedly had an extremely difficult time enjoying MM romance written by women, and I’ve had actual instances of my skin crawling when I see that said women have extensive back-catalogs of MM smut or, even worse, write only that exclusively. This doesn’t include authors that write series on a group of people (like siblings or friends), one of which happens to be gay. That’s an issue for another day.
Call me nuts, but I see it as a huge red flag when an author bio on MM romance talks about a woman living in middle America with her husband and 2.5 kiddos and a whole picket fence type situation. I simply can’t escape the feeling that authors like this view gay men as some sort of kink of theirs, or are objectifying them in the same way that heterosexual men have objectified lesbians (so long as they were obviously femme and attractive by whatever standards are, well, standard at the time).
It’s almost an instant DNF for me, and it really makes me question motives. I’m not trying to be indignant by proxy here, and liberal though I am, I’m not what most actual social justice warriors would consider a social justice warrior. It’s more of a gut feeling of wrongness, of something just feeling off.
It’s somewhat ironic in that one of my favorite things about the romance genre as a whole is the way it’s allowed women to turn the tables on the patriarchy, and essentially give them a taste of their own medicine. It’s the primary reason why I think it’s perfectly okay to have your MMC being a typical 8-packed Adonis while your FMC is something closer to my size-14 self. I don’t think it’s hypocritical so long as awareness is there that we’re reclaiming the conversation on unrealistic standards of physical beauty.
Can the same be held true for the glut of MM romance written by heterosexual women, though? I’m not sure I get to make that determination, being a cishet woman myself. But I don’t think I would go out of my way to recommend books like that. If I worked in the industry I sure as fuck wouldn’t promote it or do these fancy, gorgeous special editions of it either.
I also feel like it’s a drastically different thing to say one writes monster romance, or dark romance, when it’s exclusively featuring gay men. Why is that the choice that so many cishet female romance authors make? Again, I think it’s admirable if you’re going for representation but why should a straight woman be leading that crusade?
It’s probably important to clarify that I don’t think there’s some rule that you can only write what you’ve lived. Authors will be the first to tell you that oftentimes characters pop into their consciousness unbidden, fully formed as they are, and just because they happen to be a different race or gender identity or sexual orientation than you means you can’t write about them. I am saying that they don’t deserve to primarily make their living off that just because it’s what sells.
Stories sometimes demand to be written, regardless. But in cases where character experience might not fully align with author experience, it’s 100% on the author, not only as a matter of verisimilitude but more importantly one of respect, to do their research and make sure it’s as accurate as possible. “The Raven Scholar”, by Antonia Hodgson, is a pretty great example of this – a fantasy book written by a woman with a female protagonist who just happens to be a woman of color. Hodgson is white, yet she took care to emphasize Neema’s race and some of the experiences that are unique only to members of that race – despite not being a member of that race herself.
Now, in that example, I feel like Neema being Black doesn’t largely factor in the way she’s treated (even though it’s shitty) , so I’m led to believe that the character simply appeared to the author as a Black woman and the author did her homework to make that as authentic as possible despite it not being her lived experience. I freely admit that what information I could find on Hodgson and the book didn’t touch on this at all.
All this is to say that it’s not something I have historically seen with the MM romance I’ve read, or tried to read, at least. It’s not at all unlike how many men (mostly of the neckbeard variety, but still) pant over any bit of media featuring two women together.
I would advocate for the same as far as media depictions of homosexual male relationships, but this somehow feels different to me. That might just be an opinion on my part, but my gut really says something is rotten here, especially since money is changing hands. I don’t think a lot of these authors are rich, but they are being compensated. It’s not at all dissimilar to the way companies profit from selling pride related merch without donating to the causes and in fact helping fund candidates that would take rights for these individuals away.
I have no idea if there is a way to police stuff like this. I don’t know if this is even any of my business. Still, I can’t get away from the feeling that there is something wrong with the preponderance of MM romance written by women, especially the stuff that is being published and promoted.
Keep It To Your Shelf 